a man who remembers everything and learns nothing.

One of the things I love about America is the spontaneous brilliance and humor that undermine all pretension. No better example was that wonderful banner from our brave and ingenious soldiers in Iraq, blaring:

“HALP US JON CARRY-WE R STUCK [backwards k] HEAR N IRAK.”

20 million Americans must have seen it all over the Internet, and nothing sums up the nothingness of Kerryism better than those smiling soldiers. After seeing that, no wonder he’s offering deer-in-the headlights apologies. This is a man who remembers everything and learns nothing.

Then there was the finger-in-the wind initial Democratic response: their supposedly slight ill breeze suddenly became a Katrina hurricane, and, Presto!, they were all over the airwaves demanding from poor Kerry the apologies that just a few hours ago they thought were not necessary.

As for Kerry — how quick the 24-hour metamorphosis from smugness to defiance to purported contriteness! At his earlier blame-the-wing-nuts-and-Rush-Limbaugh press conference, he thought he was a strutting, strong-jawed Napoleonic general leading his troops to rout the evil Bush-Cheney Prussians, and then, alone, suddenly turned around — and Mein Gott in Himmel!! — his Old Guard was heading for the hills.

Victor Davis Hanson
—
NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won.
@vdhanson

Recommended Articles

Most Popular

The U.S economy is aching for many more highly skilled, technically trained people. But what if men end up limiting their eventual marriage prospects if they pursue careers in the trades or other jobs that don’t require a four-year degree? Some proportion of women who have bachelor's and post-baccalaureate ...
Read More

This weekend, Americans traveled from across the country to Washington, D.C., to participate in the March for Life and the Women’s March by walking with their poster art. While the pro-life marchers’ art focused on women and unborn life, the posters of Women’s March attendees, including small children, ...
Read More

In a statement on the Senate floor yesterday, Mazie Hirono (D., Hawaii) doubled down on her attacks against the Catholic group the Knights of Columbus and accused her colleague Senator Ben Sasse (R., Neb.) of “embrac[ing] the alt-right position” by offering a resolution rebuking the use of unconstitutional ...
Read More

B
uzzFeed published an explosive allegation that the president of the United States ordered his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, to lie to congressional committees investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. Specifically, in a news story sourced to two anonymous law-enforcement officials said to ...
Read More

Leon Trotsky — n.b., Millennials: He was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez before she was — understood the power of single-payer systems: “The old principle: who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced with a new one: who does not obey shall not eat.”
The socialist powers of Trotsky’s time made good on ...
Read More